From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Corruption in the ranks. If the government is going to persist with its current “Jail Bill Shorten” campaign, then it needs to be a little clearer in its wording. Yesterday in question time, Peter Dutton got a Dorothy Dixer on the government’s efforts “to protect Australian families from dangerous non-citizens, including criminal gang members, and keep us all safe”, which was — surprise! — actually a cue for J. Edgar Tuber to attack Shorten’s union history and how he is in thrall to a rogue’s gallery of union thugs. “What happens,” said Dutton, “is that the Labor Party is dictated to and run by the CFMEU. They’ve donated, over the last five years, $8 million to this Leader of the Opposition and this Labor Party.” 

Now, that’s a very dangerous accusation to make — that a donor, instead of making a political donation, instead simply gave money to an individual. That’s tantamount to corruption. It was so egregious that Speaker Tony Smith immediately pulled Dutton up and instructed him that “he needs to withdraw the accusation that they donated personally to the Leader of the Opposition”. Dutton then tried to change tack and claim he actually meant they had donated to Shorten’s campaign instead. Smith was having none of it. “The minister will withdraw,” he repeated, forcing Dutton to retract the comment. And you’d never pick it, but did Dutton — whose Australian Border Force has this week been revealed to have corruption in its ranks — have anything to say about the Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy having dinner with an alleged criminal gang member for the purposes of securing donations? Nary a word, curiously.

People power.The Australian Power Project has been getting a fair bit of attention in the media since popping up in January this year. Australian Power Project CEO Nathan Vass has been cropping up in articles and writing opinion pieces about the energy debate with regularity — on Tuesday he decried the “state-owned” monopoly of Ergon Energy in north Queensland, which led to people “cutting back on food, heating, and air conditioning just to afford their electricity bills”. Indeed, back in January, he caught the eye of  economist John Quiggin in these very pages. Quiggin described Vass’ opinion piece in The Australian about carbon capture technology advancesas “an exercise in misdirection worthy of a professional conjurer, managing to give an entirely false impression without saying anything that’s actually untrue”. In that same piece, Vass praised then-resources minister Matt Canavan for the pledge that coal would remain “a core part of the energy supply mix”.

The Australian Power project describes itself on its slick website as “a leading advocacy group calling for a balanced and sustainable approach to achieving a clean energy future”.  

Interestingly, there is a subtle difference in the wording between this and how Australian Power Project is described in, say, the Townsville Bulletin — the crucial word iIndustry” is inserted between “leading”and “advocacy”. One thing that barely ever seem to get mentioned, though, is Vass’ professional history.

Before starting the Australian Power Project in as a “personal project” in response to the South Australian blackout, Vass was head of media and investor relations officer for AGL Energy, “Australia’s largest owner of renewable energy assets”. His affection for “clean coal” seems to currently put him at odds with his former employer. Which may explain why he happily gave comment to a July story from The Daily Telegraph — which called him an “energy advocate”, for those keeping score at home —  accusing AGL (among others) of “price gouging”.

Recorded for quality control purposes. The world of freedom of information requests throws up mostly a lot of blacked-out boxes, but sometimes there’s a gem in the mix. The Department of Defence’s disclosure log — where all documents released under FoI are available to any curious member of the public, reveals that a Fairfax journo requested under FOI any documents relating to his media request, which was made about the service history of Human Services Department secretary Kathryn Campbell. Also included as “documents” are recordings of the phone calls made by the older-sounding journo, who says he has a Saturday column for which he needs the information. Early on in the recordings journos can relate to the frustrating requests for all correspondence to be put in an email — even questions asking why his email hasn’t been answered. But the following phone calls get heated — and it’s all out there to see. And the Department of Defence even provides a transcript for accessibility reasons. The name of the journo is redacted throughout the documents, but his former job title isn’t — it doesn’t take more than one Google search to work out who it is. You can listen to the call here.

Fashion wars. Is former PM Tony Abbott trying to beat his successor Malcolm Turnbull at his own game? In a move worthy of Mean Girls, Abbott has posed for a portrait by ABC photographer Nick Haggarty in a kangaroo leather jacket, as part of a story about the line of jackets designed by a former SAS soldier. Abbott has obviously moved on from passive-aggression to good old-fashioned aggression.

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